In my reading of various genres of novels over the years, I have learned that many early novels, or what would be called "foreign" novels were based on real battles, conflicts and government corruption.
Neither Gabriel García Márquez nor Mario Vargas Llosa had yet been born when Guatemalan Miguel Ángel Asturias began to write his first novel, El Señor Presidente, in December 1922. He labored on it for a decade while living in self-imposed exile in Paris, then returned home when the Great Depression left him strapped for money, only to find that his work was unpublishable because the dictator whose reign it portrayed had given way to an even more cruel and oppressive one. When he finally self-published the novel in Mexico in 1946, it was riddled with typographical errors, and a definitive edition did not appear until 1952.
From the beginning, El Señor Presidente has been star-crossed. But it also ranks as one of the most important and influential works of modern Latin American literature, a kind of urtext for the celebrated generation of novelists that followed Asturias and gained global recognition in the 1960s and 1970s as members of “El Boom”: García Márquez, Vargas Llosa, Carlos Fuentes, José Donoso, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Julio Cortázar, Augusto Roa Bastos, and several others.
Even a cursory reading of David Unger’s new translation of Asturias’s novel establishes why it has had such an enormous impact. In its pages one can easily discern the origins of two phenomena that the rest of the world has come to associate with 20th-century Latin American literature: the genre known as the dictator novel and the style called magical realism. It was not Gabriel García Márquez who invented magical realism; it was Miguel Ángel Asturias. This may seem outlandish to those unfamiliar with Asturias, but it provokes very little argument in Latin America.
The novel takes place in an unnamed country tyrannized by an unnamed dictator, but both the place and the time are clearly implied: buried in the text are fleeting references to the quetzal, Guatemala’s national bird, and the World War I battle of Verdun. The identity of the Constitutional President of the Republic, the Benefactor of Our Country, the Head of the Great Liberal Party, the Liberal Hearted Protector of Our Scholarly Youth is just as readily deduced: he is modeled on Manuel Estrada Cabrera, who dominated Guatemala from 1898 to 1920 through a combination of intimidation, assassination, corruption, and fraudulent elections.
In dissecting the dictator and his despotic rule, Asturias, born the year after he took power, was writing from a privileged position. After being overthrown in 1920, following a congressional vote that deemed him mentally incompetent, Estrada Cabrera was arrested, tried, and sentenced to life in prison, where he died in 1924. Asturias took part in the popular uprising that led to his downfall and was briefly jailed; then, as a law student, he served as a secretary to the tribunal that judged Estrada Cabrera. In that position, Asturias committed to paper for the first time the horrifying stories of injustice, torture, and murder that he soon drew on for his novel.
The decade Asturias spent in France, after a brief and evidently unsatisfying stopover to study economics in London, radically changed the nature of the book he set out to write. He had devoted his law school thesis to “The Social Problem of the Indian,” but he began to study ethnology at Sorbonne under the scholar Georges Raynaud, who encouraged his interest in Mayan culture and mythology; when the fruit of that academic effort, a retelling of pre-Columbian folk narratives called Legends of Guatemala, was published in French in 1931, it came with a glowing foreword by Paul Valéry.
In Paris, Asturias socialized with avant-garde literary types like the poets André Breton, Tristan Tzara, César Vallejo, Louis Aragon, and Robert Desnos, and became a committed Surrealist; he also gravitated toward Picasso, whom he would recall holding court at a Montparnasse café and proclaiming, “I deform the world because I do not like it.” So instead of writing the kind of realist social novel then in vogue in Latin America, Asturias ended up creating something much more ambitious, complex, and unconventional.
The plot of Mr. President is deceptively simple, with most of the action taking place over a single week. When a half-crazed beggar accidentally kills a particularly brutal colonel in a fit of rage, the president decides to pin the blame on a general and his lawyer, whose political loyalty he has begun to doubt. This sets in motion a series of interlinked schemes and machinations that result in the imprisonment, torture, death, bondage, or general ruination of assorted government higher-ups, who suspect what is coming, and ordinary citizens, who do not.
What makes Mr. President so revolutionary is the manner in which Asturias presents a story that contains many of the elements of classic Latin American melodrama, including a doomed love affair between the president’s closest adviser and the fallen general’s beautiful daughter. But he also repeatedly blurs or disassembles the barrier between reality and fantasy, dreams and waking, genuine and false, past and present, giving readers access to the confused perceptions, fears, and musings of a gallery of unfortunates and scoundrels.
The great insight that Asturias reached during his interlude in France - and applied to the writing of Mr. President - was that European Surrealism and Mayan mythology did not emerge from separate worlds. Rather, both were generated by the unconscious and could thus be fused.
Asturias originally intended to call his novel Tohil, which is the name of a powerful, demanding, and vengeful Mayan deity. In the Popol Vuh, the sacred creation narrative of the K’iche’ people, Tohil is the bringer of fire who, in return for offering warmth and sustenance, insists on absolute fealty from his grateful followers. To placate his jealous ego, he also demands human sacrifice and, when displeased, foments war. In short, Tohil is both an evocation of Estrada Cabrera and a metaphor for all the capricious dictators who have plagued Guatemala and the rest of Latin America since independence was achieved early in the 19th century.
Variations on this template, adapted to differing local circumstances, recur in almost every Latin American dictator novel written after Mr. President, especially those published at the peak of the Boom: Alejo Carpentier’s Reasons of State, Roa Bastos’s I, the Supreme, García Márquez’s The Autumn of the Patriarch and The General in His Labyrinth, Luisa Valenzuela’s The Lizard’s Tail, and Vargas Llosa’s The Feast of the Goat, among many others. Even a late entry from a much younger, post-Boom writer, Roberto Bolaño’s Distant Star, betrays the influence of Asturias.
Given its brilliance and influence, it continues to be a mystery why Mr. President remains less known in the English-speaking world than the many novels it inspired. One reason may be that more than 15 years elapsed between its publication in Spanish and its appearance in English in 1963, with the same title it had in Spanish. Another reason may be that, although lyrical, it is somewhat dated, full of Anglicisms, mistranslations, occasional paragraph omissions, and an overdose of awkward Latinate constructions that may leave readers scratching their head.
Unger is suited for the daunting task of taking on Asturias and his peculiar vocabulary and frequent shifts of tone. Though he writes in English, he was born in Guatemala, and his own novels, which include Life in the Damn Tropics, The Price of Escape, and The Mastermind, often take place there. Unger has also translated the Popol Vuh and teaches at City College of New York, including courses on translation.
Unger's translation of Mr. President aims to establish, in the American vernacular, the proper relation among words, sentences, and paragraphs so that the author’s startling images, metaphors, and narrative verve may speak directly to the monolingual reader.
For instance, Asturias, perhaps nostalgic in exile for the comforting sensuality of daily life in the tropics, wrote especially beautiful descriptions of both rural landscapes and the sounds and smells of urban life. Unger reproduces these passages magnificently.
One of the hallmarks of the novel is the way Asturias mixes these lyrical passages with hallucinatory episodes, some of which draw on Mayan myths. Unger successfully conveys that duality too, as well as the mordantly satirical tone of a chapter which consists of a series of memos in which ordinary citizens inform on and denounce each other in flat bureaucratic language. Set pieces, such as a vacation trip to the beach the general’s daughter takes with her cousins and a description of a train ride through the jungle, are so vivid that they almost seem to have come from a movie projector.
But Unger has some problems with dialogue. There are passages that sound like exchanges from 1930s gangster films.
Also debatable is Unger’s warning that no contemporary reader of this novel will fail to shudder when encountering slurs against Jews, Arabs, Chinese, indigenous Guatemalans, and gay and transgender people that crop up from time to time. I confess that I did not even blink, much less shudder, when I read the passages in question. The insults are quite tame and indirect, and as Unger acknowledges, they were rampant during the period Asturias is depicting. There is really no need to apologize or offer a trigger warning: it would make no more sense to sanitize El Señor Presidente than Huckleberry Finn.
As regards the dialogue, though, the problem may simply be that Mr. President confronts any translator with impossible choices and insoluble challenges. The novel is so full of idiosyncratically Guatemalan words and expressions that even Spanish-language editions come with a glossary of dozens of terms not used elsewhere in Latin America. Additionally, Asturias was trying to capture the flavor of Spanish as it was spoken in his country more than a century ago, during his youth. Imagine, then, the added difficulty of rendering these idioms into English while preserving both tone and multiple meanings.
After Mr. President, Asturias went on to have a distinguished career, both literary and political, serving in the Guatemalan Congress and as a diplomat. In 1949 he published Men of Maize, which is even more audacious and visionary in its blend of Surrealism and indigenous folklore, and during a rare decade of democracy he was assigned to embassies in Latin America and France. After an American-organized coup put the military back in power, though, Asturias was stripped of his citizenship and forced into exile, where he completed The Banana Trilogy, a cycle of novels about the suffering of indigenous workers on United Fruit Company’s Guatemalan plantations. He mostly remained abroad and continued to write novels, plays, and poems until his death in Madrid in 1974. In 1967 he became the first Latin American novelist to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.
So, in spite of Mr. President’s long and difficult road to publication, Asturias ended up achieving critical and commercial success. Yet it is never too late to burnish his reputation.
Restoring Asturias’s novel to its rightful place in Latin American cultural development and focusing its achievement are long overdue, both as an act of justice and as a contribution to historical and literary truth.
Thanks to Unger’s translation, the anglophone reader can finally be let in on the secret that Latin Americans, especially their literary elite, have always known: El Señor Presidente is a canonical work, doomed to remain timely and topical until the conditions that generated it finally disappear.
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